503 Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to handle the request.
What it means
Overload or maintenance. Retry-After may say when it will recover.
What your client should do
Honour Retry-After, otherwise back off exponentially with jitter.
Should you retry?
Yes, after the delay in the Retry-After header. Without it, back off exponentially with jitter.
Try it
The free practice API returns this status on demand, with the headers a well-behaved API would send. Call GET /api/play/status/503 from Endpoint Client and open the Explain tab.
Related codes
429 Too Many Requests
You hit a rate limit.
502 Bad Gateway
A gateway or proxy got an invalid response from the upstream server.
Defined in RFC 9110. All status codes and headers